kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Chris Pavlina <pavlina.chris@xxxxxxxxx>]

Gah, mailing list fail, sent directly to Wayne.

On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 02:32:53PM -0400, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> Hey, I'm one of those "old timers" in everything but age! I navigate 
> even my browser almost exclusively by keyboard using Vimium... The thing 
> is, I just never found them useful in a large dialog anyway because 
> they're so damned hard to read - they're good if you get used to them, 
> but you're not going to get used to the assignments in a dialog you 
> almost never use and which has so many mnemonics that it's nearly 
> running out of letters. It's more efficient to just thwack Tab a few 
> times.
> 
> But that's okay, I'm not on the warpath to remove mnemonics or anything! 
> I'll tidy up the mnemonics in that dialog and perhaps a few others and 
> submit a patch soon.
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 04, 2015 at 02:28:47PM -0400, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
> > On 8/3/2015 1:02 PM, Chris Pavlina wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > The keyboard mnemonics (underlined letters) in the eeschema and libedit 
> > > config boxes are a bit messy. There is at least one conflict (two items 
> > > sharing L), and many items missing mnemonics.
> > > 
> > > I could easily patch this, but I'd rather discuss: perhaps they should 
> > > be removed? It is not usual to have mnemonics in large, complicated 
> > > dialogs like this - they're not particularly useful there, and they are 
> > > error-prone as the current state demonstrates. People forget to add 
> > > them, or miss conflicts. Mnemonics are much more useful in dialogs that 
> > > are used frequently like text edit dialogs, where a user might want, for 
> > > example, to jump quickly to the "text size" field. With so many options, 
> > > nobody is going to remember the mnemonics anyway (note what "mnemonic" 
> > > means: it's a memory aid!), and it doesn't save any time when one has to 
> > > squint at all the options to find the underlined letter.
> > > 
> > > Of course the possibility for inconsistency goes even farther: I haven't 
> > > even checked the localizations to see how they behave.
> > > 
> > > Anybody else in favor of just removing them from these two dialogs? The 
> > > pcbnew and modedit dialogs already do not use them, and most other GUI 
> > > applications that I checked now also do not use them in their 
> > > Preferences boxes.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > --
> > > Chris
> > > 
> > 
> > While your logic make sense, my preference is to keep the mnemonics, fix
> > any duplicates, and add the missing ones in any offending dialogs.  I
> > realize on some complex dialogs, it can be difficult to set unique
> > mnemonics but that's pretty rare.  There are still a lot of us old
> > timers around who prefer our keyboards over reaching for the mouse
> > whenever possible.  I know it's passe and quaint but I'm not ready to
> > give it up just yet :)
> > 
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